Data Visualization Analysis of "Hamilton" Lyrical Data

Joel Eastwood and Erik Hinton from The Wall Street Journal analyzed some of the rhyming patterns and lyrics from the recent Broadway hit, "Hamilton." Taking on creator Lin-Manuel Miranda's lyrics was no easy task. As Eastwood and Hinton state in their article, the musical has "some of the most densely packed, complex rhyming lyrics in the history of musicals." They created an algorithm and visualizations to help analyze some of the rhyming patterns and lyrics featured in the musical.

At first, the visualizations weren't exactly clear because I was trying to decipher what the different colour-codes meant and how they were actually analyzing and categorizing the rhymes. Reading the second article about the methodology behind creating the algorithm and the research they did helped clarify some of these things for me. The different lyric maps/visualizations and being able to play the sections of the songs being analyzed also made things clearer. Visually following how the different rhyming patterns play out in the songs was useful for interpreting and understanding the data and patterns.

Some notes on and an example from The Wall Street Journal article/data set.

Illustrated in the image above, there is a section with the different phonetic rhyming families listed with their respective colour-codes. Users can also play the section of the song being analyzed, follow the rhyming pattern(s) as it plays, and match up the rhyming families through the colour-coded squares. Underneath this section, the lyrics are also made available and the rhyming words are colour-coded according to the corresponding rhyming family.

Being that this was a music and lyric-based visualization, having the data mapped out almost like a music sheet worked and was an interesting style choice. I don't think another chart or map style would have worked as well for what Eastwood and Hinton were trying to achieve with this particular data set.

Playing the song sections, clicking on each individual square, and clicking on the lyrics are the main interactive features for this visualization. As previously mentioned, playing sections of the songs being analyzed made things clearer and was a strong visual aid. However, it feels like being able to click on the individual squares or lyrics is not completely necessary or useful. These interactive features were all easy enough to use and decipher, but having all of the different interactive options seems to over-complicate things. Just having the song playing and the squares showing the rhyming patterns could be enough.